Here’s a novelty: a book about love as utter abandonment of the self, love as capitulation, love as not only obsession but possession, which manages not to be overwrought. ... Delabroy-Allard succeeds by keeping things simple and using repeated phrases to layer the story ... The second half of the book is even more satisfying than the first, as the narrator flies to Italy, stays with a friend, and keeps moving to prevent the settlement of thoughts she would rather not face. The sentences and sections become longer, reflecting the scurrying activity of her mind ... The persuasive translation by Adriana Hunter does occasionally let an awkward word poke through its straightforward language ... But these don’t diminish the pleasures of a book that reads at times—this is high praise—like a new iteration of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (absorbing passion, illness, separation) and that moves impressively from the chaos and noise of love, to silence and solitude, like a spun coin settling.

The hyperbolic emotion of this novel sometimes tips into cliché, but Delabroy-Allard insists on holding space for an unfiltered expression of pain. Melodramatic expressions are interspersed with straightforward pieces of wisdom ... Hunter’s translation highlights the inertia and cycling of the absolutist thought patterns of love, with simple language that moves out of the way of its subject. This poetic and mystifying debut draws blood.

To read They Say Sarah is to understand what it means for a novel to be 'breathtaking' ... French writer Pauline Delabroy-Allard has created, in her literary debut, a deeply impressionistic novel which thrusts the reader from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other. The impact is stunning; from the opening chapter the momentum doesn't let up ... Delabroy-Allard's use of language is magnificent (and Adriana Hunter's translation does a superb job of maintaining the effect). The accelerated sense of momentum is conveyed by an unfettered use of present tense. Long run-on sentences are coupled with staccato-like short, repetitive clauses. Time is condensed; seconds stretch into paragraphs and days merge in mere sentences. The sweeping emotional effect is a reminder of the potency of language ... the beauty of They Say Sarah is that it lashes its vividly erotic prose to a thoughtfully constructed literary framework, producing by the end of its scant 160 pages an elevated statement on the human condition ... The book's vivid emotional lure masks a deeper statement on our collective inability to achieve—let alone balance—love in a contemporary world where most of us just struggle along plagued by a faintly numb sense of always desiring more.

This is simply a remarkable creation by Delabroy-Allard who deserves huge congratulations for writing such a gripping and evocative debut novel. Set in Paris, it captures an engrossing and compelling same-sex love affair between the narrator (name unknown) and Sarah. A love affair that consists of ecstasy and magic coupled with emotional pain and misery in equal measure ... a faultless tour de force from start to finish which gives glimpses of a love that is sometimes dysfunctional, painful, and profound. This is a bold novel, make no mistake; some readers will love it and others won’t. The sex acts between the two women are described in fairly graphic detail sometimes, and this will inevitably stir up internalized homophobia from within the LGBTQ+ community among those who haven’t reconciled with their own feelings towards the same sex. And when that occurs, envy, rejection and criticism often result—even from literature ... Disliking a story and criticizing its writing style are two separate entities. In this case, disliking They Say Sarah would be difficult because the story is so well told. Skill and craftsmanship ooze from this beautiful novel. It would be a cliché to just say that it’s well written because that wouldn’t do the book full justice. The writing style and layout portray a clever, innovative, and incredibly talented approach by Delabroy-Allard. She certainly is a writer of the present and the future.

... titillating with its frank descriptions of sex and erotic paeans to the female body...and captivating with its investigation of the suffering involved in passion. It’s a brief, intense read. There is no world beyond the physiological experiences of the lovers. We see into the narrator’s mind only when she is experiencing the effects of desire, or falling apart in its wake. Other characters—the lovers’ parents, the narrator’s daughter—appear but are not given a chance to exist. Much about the tone of the novel reminded me of Leïla Slimani’s work. As with Slimani, there’s a combination of breathless excitement and flatness: as though Samuel Richardson has been crossed with Albert Camus. In both cases there is something compulsive about the reading experience, partly just because the feverish rhythms carry us along ... There’s an arbitrariness in the [relationship's] destructiveness that makes it unconvincing ... It could be argued that the arbitrary nature of both passion and destructiveness is precisely what the novel is about. It’s partly an exploration of the solipsism that sex can seem to justify, pushed almost to the point of comedy in a book that still manages to remain humourless ... The best parts of the book are where the narrator goes deeper into inhabiting her own craziness in Sarah’s absence ... It’s as though Delabroy-Allard fully accepts here that she has given up on the social novel altogether, and moves instead into a form of travel writing that ends up being more alluring and disturbing than the sex scenes. I found the 'glimmering gold, blindingly beautiful' Adriatic the perfect backdrop for the narrator’s decline, if only because the dreamlike setting stopped me minding how wilfully unconvincing the characterisation is beneath the seductive prose.

... a whirlwind jaunt ... The prose’s short, noirish lines...barrel forward with relentless momentum ... The narrator’s obsessing on the torrid effects of a passion abruptly ended...creates a lean alternative to the amplified interrelational tension found in her contemporaries Ottessa Moshfegh and Guadalupe Nettal, with thrilling, if less heady, results. This slim tale will interest fans of French pulp legend Francis Carco.

In a whirlwind of queer eroticism, classical strings, and vernal sensuality, debut novelist Delabroy-Allard whips up a bracing portrait of consumptive love and mutual obsession ... While the cumulative effect of repetition can at times slow rather than drive the swell of the narrative's crescendo, overall the prose exerts a tidal pull, and the book's structure skillfully mirrors the story's atmosphere: The short vignettes that constitute Part I replicate the breathless swirl of the narrator's turbulent affair with Sarah while lengthening chapters throughout Part II reflect her descent into rambling dishevelment and a sense of being stuck in time ... A dizzying, lush flight through the ecstasy and devastation of an incendiary romance and the grief that follows its loss.